In the “oh my, that’s not good” department comes this report about fake lawyers who put up websites pretending to be real lawyers. They copy the real lawyers’ names, photos, bios, and other information, but change the contact information.
Presumably, the goal is to bring in clients and steal their money, or set up fraudulent cases and rip off insurance companies with “you” as the attorney.
Don’t laugh. It happened to me.
This was many years ago, in the dark days before the Internet. I got a call from a fraud investigator who wanted to talk to me about one of my cases. I didn’t recognize the name of the client, however, and had never had an office at the address on the letter of representation.
How long had this been going on? How many other clients had this impostor represented in my name?
The fake lawyer was quickly caught and shut down and that was the end of the situation, but it was still very unsettling.
What I could to prevent this from happening again, I asked myself. I couldn’t come up with anything. But (as far as I know) it never happened again.
Today, where you can set up a website in ten minutes and get it indexed in search engines within hours, what’s to keep bad guys from impersonating you?
Nothing.
They may not get away with it, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try.
How can you protect yourself? I don’t have a good answer, other than constant vigilance, i.e., regularly searching your name and your firm’s name to see what’s out there, something you should probably be doing anyway.
And, just in case, you might want to ask your errors and omissions carrier and bar association about  your exposure if it does happen.
If it does happen to you, take a look at how the fake lawyers are marketing you. If they’re good at it, you might want to steal some of their ideas.
